Killings in Kosovo Are Described at War Trial

By IAN FISHER

Published: February 26, 2002

THE HAGUE, Feb. 25—
An Albanian doctor, describing the war in Kosovo in 1999, recounted in court today how he watched through his window as the Serbian police executed two of his relatives.

Then he heard gunshots as the police killed four more people in a house nearby, and he watched as they set a building on fire and placed all the bodies there to be immolated along with it.

''The rafters began to fall onto the bodies, which were enveloped by flames,'' the doctor, Agron Berisha, 38, testified. ''It seems that the criminals had this as their daily business. They were well trained. They knew where to leave the bodies so they would be burned up.''

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader on trial here for war crimes, took plentiful notes during Dr. Berisha's testimony, delivered with little of the nervousness of other witnesses who have taken the stand against Mr. Milosevic.

In his cross-examination, Mr. Milosevic worked again to make the NATO airstrikes the issue, trying once more to show the courtroom grisly photographs of victims of those bombings, which began two days before the killings Dr. Berisha described, in March 1999.

''I'm testing a value judgment of the witness, who says that the NATO bombing was welcome,'' he said, when Richard May, the chief judge, objected to showing the photographs. ''I should like him to take a look at the photographs and ask him if he considers this to be a welcome thing or not.''

The day's testimony highlighted what might become a problem for Mr. Milosevic: so far, as a general defense, he has nimbly seized every opportunity to blame the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Albanian guerrillas for killings in Kosovo. But, as legal experts point out, alleging guilt of others may not help Mr. Milosevic rebut the specific allegations against forces under his command. Prosecutors intend to call dozens of witnesses like Dr. Berisha.

The events at Suva Reka may prove especially damaging to Mr. Milosevic.

Although Dr. Berisha did not witness it, he described what happened after he saw his relatives killed. The same Serb forces rounded up about 40 members of his extended family, including women and children, and massacred them in a pizzeria.

''As I have been told by people who saw it and experienced that terror, groups of soldiers and police shot pitilessly with automatic weapons and threw grenades at them,'' he said. ''All of them were killed in that pizzeria. Then trucks came and loaded up the bodies.''

Prosecutors have indicated that they intend to show that those bodies were taken to mass graves unearthed only late last year near Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, to suggest that Mr. Milosevic was covering up the crime.

On the ninth day of Mr. Milosevic's war crimes trial, he accused the court of bringing ''false witnesses'' against him. His accusation came after he made a prolonged attempt to get another witness, Halil Morina, a retired farmer, to admit that soldiers from the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian rebel group, had killed four Serb soldiers before Serb forces burned about three quarters of his village, Landovica, in March 1999.

Mr. Morina, who lived in the village all his life, steadfastly denied any knowledge at all about the K.L.A. or its presence there. But Mr. Milosevic got him to admit that a monument to fallen K.L.A. soldiers had been erected there after the war.

''How could a monument be built for dead soldiers of the K.L.A. if there weren't any there in first place?'' Mr. Milosevic asked.

Mr. Morina replied, ''I don't know. The K.L.A. must have done that.''

Later, Mr. Milosevic exploded in frustration, saying that Mr. Morina, like earlier witnesses, did not know enough to testify against him.

''I must say, gentlemen, that you are bringing in witnesses of this kind to ill-treat me,'' he told the judges.

Accusing the court of forcing him to prove his innocence, he added: ''These are false witnesses, Mr. May. They are being used to pull out the pieces from the mosaic of war in Yugoslavia.''

In an interview published this week, Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister who engineered Mr. Milosevic's transfer to The Hague last June, also criticized the quality of the witnesses against Mr. Milosevic, calling the trial ''a circus.''

''I am speechless when I see how much money has gone up in smoke to allow the court to take five years to unearth such insignificant witnesses,'' Mr. Djindjic said in an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel. ''This circus has left both myself and my government facing an awkward dilemma.''

Now, he said, many Serbs have accepted Mr. Milosevic's version that NATO is the guilty party.

Mr. Djindjic said he would not extradite Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general widely reported to be living in Belgrade. He said that Mr. Mladic was too well protected and that he would not risk his soldiers' lives to make the arrest.